Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Brooklyn (Grow Chard)

This week, and perhaps only this week, we're having our minor Bay winter. Hoofing down Broadway in a shiver, listening to this song (hit play 6 for the recommended soundtrack to this post), I could be back in Brooklyn.




You're supposed to love New York, but I never could, even though I spent formative years 1-3 and 22-24 there. The cold concrete is enough to blast and wilt a sunny California girl, like frost does basil. With more money and brashness I might have enjoyed it, but instead I was a tad disabled--and, as a result, only marginally employable--and the towers fell as soon as I arrived.


But I didn't live in The City. I lived in Brooklyn. Brooklyn I liked. It shares a lot of good qualities with Oakland: The Town vs The City, the teeming diversity, the "land" name. (Of course Oakland is softer--and in all the right places, I would argue. Less harassment, better weather, more vegetarian food.)

I had always liked the idea of Brooklyn, the "No Sleep 'Til..." and the "Tims for my hooligans in..." It was the original habitat of my white-bearded college Yiddish professor, and the place where John Travolta wolfed down two slices of pizza folded lengthwise in Saturday Night Fever.

We lived on a cool row house block in Boerum Hill, which was not yet the glamorous neighborhood it has become, although the clashes of gentrification were already thick in the air. The brownstone whose upstairs we occupied was classic East Coast historic/grimy. We shared it with a sad family and there was no door to shut between their part of the house and ours.

We joined the Park Slope Food Coop, where shopping for fine cheese at low prices was a joy, and working the cash register once a month ranged from tolerable to sort of fun. There were ATMs nearby that operated in Yiddish and I was fascinated by the young Hasid mothers with their wigs and babies on their hips, pushing overloaded shopping carts.

The late, great record store Beat Street was on Fulton. It was mecca for Crim. He entered his first dj battles there, and made pals with the staff, Scoob and Finesse and Pebbles. Somehow Beat Street was just a few blocks from our place, as were the new Smith Street restaurants that taunted our brokeness, and the miracle bodega that could produce any grocery item at any hour, and, my own mecca, the community garden.

I learned to garden in Brooklyn, which makes no sense, unless considered from the "Rose in Spanish Harlem" sort of angle, of yearning to grow something in the cracks of the concrete. It wasn't a garden to which anyone was particularly devoted, but that was fine with me, because it meant I could expand my empire of chard and Brandywines one abandoned plot at a time. I nurtured my raised beds with obsessive care; I got the soil so friable it became legend among the neighborhood cats. But the hard truth is that community gardening often sucks, at least in Brooklyn. The Brandywines all got smashed in the night. Gardening made me appreciate private property.

The downstairs teenage neighbor and his friend Jerrell were a Dean Street pair straight out of a Lethem novel: the Jewish kid from the row house, the black kid from Gowanus Projects. The dirty yellow walls of the brownstone were preferable to Gowanus; when a visitor was at the door and no one had ordered pizza, it had to be Jerrell. And he wasn't shy about buzzing that bell for a looong time if his chum didn't appear. We would see the top of his head from our window four floors up and sing our jingle:

It's Jerrell!
It's Jerrell!
Who's ringin the bell?
Well, it's Jerrell!

The song grew lots of verses and variations that I've since forgotten. For hardass Brooklyn kids, both guys were sweethearts. When I brought them to the community garden, they tasted some mint and politely considered it as a gum alternative.

At the end of our stint, Crim worked at Book Court, on Court Street, where Jonathan authors were known to show up and browse, all writerly and unshaven. Court had a great bagel place too. And the pizza. Oh, the Brooklyn pizza: giving so much and asking so little. We survived two sticky summers (one without AC) and one blizzard, which made the streets quiet and magical. I had expected a more chaotic effect from a word like that.

The thing is, you can picture a place as a whole, with a line connecting the Yiddish ATMs to Beat Street (presumably with the Beastie Boys as midpoint). But when you're actually there, the divisions are hardened. I couldn't have lived in Brooklyn for keeps. Still, on a winter's day like this one, I could go for a plain slice.

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

I Will Do Anything to Be Part of the Blogoaksphere

I never meant to be a holdout. College Grads in Urban Areas Without Cellphones is a sorry club. I imagine a bunch of tweedy middle-aged men with Objections. What's a perky twentysomething (fifty-nine days left on that claim) doing with those old sods?

It was an accident, I assure you, not some statement of principle. It wasn't that I didn't want a cellphone. I just never wanted one. Like, not paying-money-every-month want. I'm a part-time receptionist. I can't buy things just because.

Now when it comes out that I'm not carrying, I have to go all explainy, and hear expressions of astonishment, and perhaps even get congratulated on my contrarian pluck. All of which is possibly worse than shelling out monthly and being all *reachable*. And I'm wide open to accusations of dinosaurism. You're not on Facebook. And you don't have a cell. Oh my God: and you have CHICKENS. They start building a Theory. They think I have Objections.

So let me be clear: I'm totally going to get a cellphone one day. I daydream about it, even. My phone will do every damn thing those Japanese phones do now--for less! Print cash, perform voodoo hexes, all that. See, because I'm going to leapfrog. That's how sophisticated I am.

However, technology for its own sake does irritate me. I don't want a bunch of neato shit that's only going to drain and distract. Yes, I have a plog. That does not mean I want to Twitter. I plog because I like to write (do I vainly hope this is apparent?), not because I'm a connectivity whore. So leave me and my hens alone.


Was what I was saying. But then Crim became part of the Blogoaksphere. His wunderkind, Oakland Streets, won the warm embrace of linkage from every other cool Oakland blog. That had the incidental effect of creating readership--a whizbang concept I hadn't considered. Here was a connectivity I could get behind! I realized that I would do anything to be part of the Blogoaksphere.

At an Oscar ceremony a few years back, Steve Martin introduced Gael García Bernal (you know, the muchacho guapo from Y tu mamá también) by saying: "I would do anything to look like this guy. Except, of course, eat right and exercise."

So Clebilicious will do anything to be part of the Blogoaksphere. Except, of course, be more accessible and stick to a topic.

Friday, December 5, 2008

Dear King of the South: Okay, I'll Do It

Dear T.I.,

It has come to my attention that you want to have sex with me. Not me specifically, of course, but me generally. Do I miscontrue? Your intentions seem clear.

You began with gentle teasing:

Go and tell a n***** no, with a ass so fat,
Why you wanna go and do that love, huh?

You plied me with lilting pimp talk and I thought, why would I want to go and do that? Why decline your advances while in possession of an ass so fat? And thank you, by the way, for commending its fatness--not its bubbliness or its roundness, but its very fatness. This successful entreaty gave you the upper hand, and you played it naughtily:

I wanna kiss you everywhere between yo knees and waist
Hear the sounds that you making, get yo knees to shake

Well! I...I was rather flustered...and...But certainly not! I rebutted forcefully that I was not interested and had a very nice boyfriend, thank you.

Can't help but notice how you glowing, I can see in yo face
Now I just wonder if he know he close to being replaced

The gall! No. No. No. I would not have you. I found you abhorrent! As it became clear I wouldn't be taken in by the usual pimpy patter, you changed tack:

Compliment you on your intellect and treat you wit respect

(The change was momentary.)

Give you sex till you sweat, tongue kissing on yo neck
It's been awhile since she got it like this I bet

My mind was pacified by the bone thrown it, leaving my loins free to hear the offer. You watched the melting of my resolve with satisfaction. You cocked your head, and with a squinty stare, moved to close the deal:

How you keep saying no when yo panties so wet?

It was a legitimate question--and yet, I kept saying no. I had a nice enough life. Why throw it all away? I watched American Gangster and you looked a bit young and scrawny. I would be taller in heels and you would be married in any case.


I didn't hear from you for a while and considered myself out of danger. Little did I know you were just giving your seduction mission a fallow period, single-minded man that you are. In that period, you researched. You obtained my bank records and credit reports. You monitored my Firefox-window shopping. A new strategy took shape. And when the moment was ripe, you hit me with it, hard:

Stacks on deck
'Tron on ice
And we can pop bottles all night
Baby you could have whatever you like

I could have. Whatever I liked. Weak knees and wet panties were only the beginning! And it was the way you said it, pressing the "ever," drawing out the "like," engaging the full Southern sine curve of your voice and pouring out every drop of charisma. You played dirty again too:

Late night sex so wet you're so tight
I'll gas up the jet for you tonight
Baby you could go where ever you like

Which brings me to the point. I write today to say, T.I.: I submit. Call me.

Yours cordially,
Cleb

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Bon Anniversaire, Clebilicieux!

This week, Clebilicious turns two. Easy as it is for a little plog like this one to fade into oblivion, I think a Moment is called for.

So...we did it! Another year of non-deletion! Thank you, cher reader.

As a little b-day treat for the 'Licious, I'm updating the 'Best Of' feature at right. (It's a treat in that it makes the plog feel good about itself.) And I'm looking for suggestions from Clebketeers like yourself. So if there was a post that perhaps made some meager dent in the boredom of your workday--or to put it in the confident terms of a now-veteran plogger, that you enjoyed--do leave a comment and let me know.